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The Ten College Campuses with the Best Architecture

Some universities have long shown off their innovative thinking (and healthy endowments) by mixing classic collegiate styles with modernist icons—think Harvard, Yale, or MIT. Some seem only grudgingly to allow contemporary architecture within eyeshot of their traditional quads. Yet others, like the University of Virginia, wouldn’t change a thing. Our tour of campuses with the most significant architectural traditions includes some major players, as well as a few surprises with histories all their own. We present the AD college review

University of Virginia

When Thomas Jefferson is your chief architect and your campus has been named a World Heritage site, you don’t have a lot to prove architecturally. In 1976, the school even undid the changes to its trademark rotunda made by famed Beaux Arts architect Stanford White, in favor of Jefferson’s original Neoclassical design, above. The campus is no museum, however: The magnificent, terraced Lawn, innovative for its time, is a vibrant, accommodating gathering spot today.

Photo: Jane Haley/U.Va. Public Affairs

Harvard University

The country’s oldest institution for higher learning looks it, with buildings going back to the 1720s, but it was also one of the first schools to embrace modernist architecture. The Carpenter Center, its pedestrian ramp slicing radically through its middle, is Le Corbusier’s only building in America (not counting his collaboration on the United Nations headquarters). But it was Corbusier’s protégé, Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert, who truly shaped Harvard’s modernist legacy with still-controversial designs for the Holyoke Center and the Harvard Science Center, above, among other prominent buildings.

Photo: Kris Snibbe/Harvard University

Yale University

In the campus construction boom that followed World War II, Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, and Gordon Bunshaft (whose Beinecke Rare Book Library is pictured in the foreground) all placed buildings among Yale’s Georgian and Gothic Revival piles. The tradition of nontraditional work continues with examples from Kieran Timberlake, Sir Michael Hopkins, and Cesar Pelli, with a Norman Foster project on its way. Says Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the university’s School of Architecture, “Yale’s campus is as good a place as any to witness over 300 years of architectural history.”

Brown University

Brown’s architectural ambitions have not always risen to the level of its academic reputation—at least until February, when Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s transparent (both inside and out) Granoff Center for the Creative Arts was completed. This old-world campus perched above Rhode Island’s capital finally has a building to match its progressive education.

Photo: Iwan Baan

Florida Southern College

The largest single-site collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in the world, this little-known campus on swampy Lake Hollingsworth includes a dozen of his structures connected by low esplanade roofs that provide relief from the harsh sun. Students, both male and female, played a huge role in the campus’s construction through the 1940s and ’50s, exchanging carpentry and masonry skills for free tuition.

Photo: Michael Lowry, courtesy of Florida Southern College

Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)

More corporate than collegiate in looks, IIT is a pilgrimage stop for fans of Mies van der Rohe, the former head of the school’s architecture program. The master of International modernism is responsible for the site design as well as for Crown Hall, above, which sets the tone for the steel-and-glass campus. Even Rem Koolhaas’s 2003 Campus Center, featuring a 530-foot-long steel tube encircling an elevated railway, honors Mies with a 20-foot-tall glass portrait at its entrance.

Photo courtesy of Illinois Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The red brick of Alvar Aalto’s massive Baker House dormitory, built in 1949, and Eero Saarinen’s tiny 1955 chapel blend in seamlessly with MIT’s look, but there is nothing conservative about their undulating designs. MIT continues to push the envelope—with mixed results. Frank Gehry’s Stata Center, left, is better known for its leaks than for its wild form, but Steven Holl’s Simmons Hall matches the scale and audacity of Aalto’s design.

Photo: Donna Coveney/MIT News

Pratt Institute

A fire at the architecture school, Higgins Hall, occasioned Steven Holl’s translucent addition in 2005, left, linking landmark buildings on Pratt’s stately 19th-century redbrick campus. Says Holl, “It is about being able to read time in layers.” Other contemporary standouts on this small, enclosed campus include Leo J. Pantas Hall dormitory, a 1980s Skidmore, Owings & Merrill design, but it’s the dozens of structures built between 1885 and World War II that put Pratt on the National Register of Historic Places.

Photo: Paul Warchol

Cornell University

Cornell’s cautious approach to contemporary buildings is captured in its decade-long saga over the new home for its architecture school, Milstein Hall. After two firms’ plans were rejected, a smart, bold design by the New York office of Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA, shown in a rendering here, will open this summer. It will join Sir James Stirling’s 1989 postmodern arts center and an art museum by I.M. Pei built in 1973.

Image: University Avenue East/OMA/courtesy of OMA

Bennington College

The open-minded students and teachers who occupy these 550 wooded acres at the foot of the Green Mountains interact in buildings by Robertson Ward, Pietro Belluschi, Carl Koch, Kyu Sung Woo, and Edward Larrabee Barnes, whose designs for student housing are shown here. The latest addition to the campus is the Center for the Advancement of Public Action, three buildings constructed of local materials nestled into a sloping site designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.